Margaret Dumont – MovieActors.com

Born Daisy Juliette Baker October 20, 1882 in Brooklyn, New York, Margaret was originally trained as an opera singer and actress in her teens.

She began to attract notice for her vocal and comedic talents in The Girl Behind the Counter (1908), The Belle of Brittany (1909), and The Summer Widower (1910).

She then came to the attention of writer George S. Kaufman, who hired her to play the dowager Mrs. Potter alongside the Four Marx Brothers in their Broadway production of The Cocoanuts in 1925. As wealthy widow Mrs. Potter, Margaret became the formidable stage target for the rapid-fire insults and bizarre lovemaking approach of Groucho Marx and in October 1928 their next Broadway show, Animal Crackers, opened, and Dumont was again cast as the wealthy society dowager and their straight woman. In 1929 they filmed the screen version of The Cocoanuts, which was one of the first true talking pictures. Margaret would go on to star in seven Marx Brothers films - as Mrs. Gloria Teasdale in Duck Soup (1933), as Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera (1935), Emily Upjohn in A Day at the Races (1937), Mrs. Suzanna Dukesbury in At the Circus (1939), and as Martha Phelps in The Big Store (1941).

Through the course of her career Margaret played in 57 films, alongside such comic greats as W.C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, (1941) and Tales of Manhattan (1942), Abbott and Costello in Little Giant (1946), Laurel and Hardy in The Dancing Masters (1943), Red Skelton in Bathing Beauty (1944), Jack Benny in The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), Wheeler and Woolsey in Kentucky Kernels (1934) and High Flyers (1937), and Danny Kaye in Up In Arms (1944), and on television with Martin and Lewis in The Colgate Comedy Hour (1951).